


Gold-Hatted Lover

by LieutenantSaavik



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-03-23 16:24:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 9,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13791537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/pseuds/LieutenantSaavik
Summary: Who was Gatsby? Who was he to me when the body was found in the pool? I remember his endless motion, his undiluted extravagance, and most acutely, his enchanting smile. He had the whole world when he reached out to it, yet he allowed himself to live in a bubble from where he could safely desire that which was out of his reach. He was human, and somehow more, and somehow less.Following the events of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway returns West, only to find himself borne back into chaos as odd, mysterious phone calls and letters, all claimed to be from the late Jay Gatsby, repeatedly arrive at his house.





	1. Chapter 1

> "There is art to be undone in the world." (Zelda Fitzgerald)
> 
> * * *
> 
>  

I suppose you could call me quiet by nature. I’ve never expressly tried to be, nor have I carefully crafted silence into my personality; it’s merely an innate instinct to withhold my words. I attribute part of that trait to my father’s words, his imparted inclination to reserve all judgements, and the other part I ascribe to my own life experience. Often I have felt I were a passenger in another’s story, and subsequently prescribed myself the duty of writing that story down, as I have done with Gatsby -- though that became, rather than just a chronicle of events, an attempt to bring justice to his name. I considered removing my name from the story before I mailed it, replacing each instance of Carraway with a pseudonym, but ultimately decided that there was enough dishonesty in the tale without augmenting it. So Nick Carraway, the particular version of me I was at the time, became a character, releasing the Nick Carraway I am now towards a new version of growth.

I had been home three months before the restlessness started, and I remember that period as the most uneventful of my life. There was no ceremony for my return, no celebration; I was welcomed back into my neighborhood with as little fanfare as possible. The old woman whose name I never knew had baked me cookies, and I was shyly left flowers on my doorstep, and then I slid back into Western life like a hand into a too-small glove. I suspect my old sweetheart had laid the apologetic bouquet; the poor girl had been so attached to me before I ran off to New York and left her. It was hard for me to muster sympathy then, however -- she had rumored us to be engaged so that we would become so. It was a cleverer thing than I had thought her to be capable of, but that was before my ideas of the human mind were wildly rent askew by the East and its deceitful coquetry. That coquetry consumed my mind; the telling of Gatsby’s story became an obsession, and though I lived only a short train ride from my parents, my thoughts dwelled Eastward instead of home.

Those first months played like a grainy film: repetitive, soundless, and indistinct. They were a quiet fourteen weeks, weeks during which I was alternately sick and resting, writing furiously, and daylighting half-time as a grocer, since there was no stock market to be found. I worked barely enough to support myself and came home each day in a daze, but I had the comfort of knowing that there would be no surprises in the coming hours. There would be no tumultuous uproar next-door, no gilded light pouring in great swaths through my windows, no more screeching cars and dangling pearls and nights that roared with vibrance. There should have been peace, through it all -- there were no parties, no rumors, no giggling champagne or table-top dancers who sold their dignity to crazed applause. There should have been peace, and instead there was a remote echo, a glittering ghostliness that hovered at the edges of my sight and hearing. Some part of me never stopped expecting Gatsby’s stately mansion to rise like an undead spirit in the view from my window. Instead, I saw grey automobiles trundling back and forth across a dreary road. So I wrote with single-minded devotion and worked with mindless apathy, my days keeping pattern for weeks on end. That was my life, for longer than it should have been.

Once the manuscript had been mailed, life turned hellish. I became cagey, irascible, and lost my job to accusations of disorderly conduct. I spent a night on the streets before crawling home to my parents, unkempt and dirty. I told them I had gotten drunk, though I hadn’t, and they exchanged a worried glance over my bowed head, not knowing my eyes watched them. They pitied me, which hurt, but I suspect I really was pitiable. I had quit one job and lost a second, exhausted the reserves of my memory to extract the last drops of New York from it, and had nothing to show for it except nightmares of red water and a name that never left my mind.

Who was Gatsby? Who was he to me when the body was found in the pool? That question I still grapple with. I never exactly called him a friend. He was never himself around me, and I believe he never knew who he himself was. I remember his endless motion, his undiluted extravagance, and most acutely, his enchanting smile. He had the whole world when he reached out to it, yet he allowed himself to live in a bubble from where he could safely desire that which was out of his reach. He was human, and somehow more, and somehow less.

 

The weather turned biting as the second year home spun toward its last days, and then it was Christmastime. Aunts and uncles and cousins poured by in whirls of skirts and suits and meaningless smiles, and I spent more and more of my time outside, wreathing doorways and clearing snow for spare change. Nights cloaked themselves in cold and quiet mystery, and I was grateful in the evenings for the peace. My family didn’t host many guests, and certainly none notable; the Fays were not present and were not missed. Daisy actually went so far as to write a note of holiday wishes, addressed exclusively to me, her “Dear cousin,” but I savagely burnt it, consigning the curls of her writing turning to the curls of smoke that vanished palely up the flue. She had her own tree, I was sure; some glowing excrescence decked out in candles and baubles and pure ethereal light, perpetually cascading needles that she’d have a maid sweep up. I thought of her child, locked up as she was with her nanny all day, and wondered if she’d yet absorbed any of her mother’s intoxicating guile.

From this period I only remember one conversation. It was three days before Christmas Eve, and one of my mother’s sisters was unabashedly drunk, elevated by revelry, rosy-cheeked and good-humored. She was a spirited woman, a heavy smoker, who bore the name of Mary. Unlike her Biblical namesake, however, she was childless, and her husband had died in the war. Nevertheless, she released maternal affection to anyone of any age, especially when they came to her to be beaten soundly at a game of hearts. 

“We’re lost,” she was saying as I left the kitchen with a piece of day-old gingerbread in my hand. “All of us. Flat lost. Directionless.  _ Perdu _ .”

My father made some noncommittal noise of bland agreement.

“What I mean is,” she placed a hand on the table, took a napkin into it, and crumpled it within her fist, “I wish there’d never been any God-damned  _ war _ .”

“So do I,” my father said, his eyes still carefully neutral. “Maybe we should get you upstairs.”

“Oh, get me into the kitchen, get me out of the kitchen, get me out into the hall and out the damn door.” She waved her hand vaguely, dropping the napkin to the floor. Instead of looking after it, she looked toward me, as if expecting me to retrieve it for her. For a moment, there was something else behind her lips, something urgent, and her eyes met mine with force. Then, brusquely, the unreadable implication was extinguished, and her eyes dropped to her lap. Murmuring broken French, she held her arms out to my father, who chivalrously helped her reach her feet. Thus gracelessly connected, they departed, leaving me alone and thoughtful at the entrance to the dining room. 

I wondered what she had almost said, if her suppression were rudimentary self-censorship or if the thought had merely escaped her. The event was infinitely less absorbing at the time than is reflected here, and my thoughts were turning elsewhere before the minute had elapsed, but in hindsight, the scene was signal. For as I stood there solitary, sampling stale gingerbread, a precipitously loud call rang throughout the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be updated rather slowly, I'm afraid! Attempting to write like ol' F. Thot Fitzgerald can be a bit of a chore.


	2. Chapter 2

Since I had nothing else to do, not being involved in any conversation nor activity of note, I assumed I had been informally handed the duty of answering the telephone and accordingly retrieved the receiver in the pantry, where it was kept because a door could easily be closed to muffle private talks. “Hello,” I began, expecting a simplistic holiday greeting from yet another cluster of cheery voices. Instead, however, initial silence met my ears, three seconds of nothing stretching between me and the taciturn unknown on the other end. “Hello,” I offered again, wondering if some lit roisterer had dialed in the wrong number by mistake. As soon as I spoke the second time, there was a sharp, abortive intake of air; then, abruptly, the call was terminated. Perplexed, I took the receiver away from my ear and pondered it, then rehooked it unceremoniously and turned away.

It was now, I realised as I left the pantry, uncomfortably warm in the house and increasingly crowded in the kitchen. Fires blazed blithely in grates as stoves growled merrily away, rotating streams of ruddy, half-glowing people attached to them, stirring and smiling and sampling again. A Carraway Christmas is days in the making; family feasts are nothing short of sheer, voluptuous wonder. Not currently commissioned to aid in the preparation, however, I decided to leave the now-stifling atmosphere and head for a short time into the cooler caress of the outdoors. I left out the back, hoping I would not be noticed nor missed.

Outside, slow warmth rippled across the sighing air. It was that peaceful, particularly Western transference of evening to night, and across the state, within walls, men and women were cooking, dancing, lighting the candles in their windows, rearranging wreaths, and all insisting--in some small, subtle way--that they were islands of safety, little love-nests of joy which nothing but light and Christmas spirit could touch. Their counterparts were returning from offices, from stores, locking their livelihoods up for the night to deliver themselves home. Trains and cars crashed along tracks and roads throughout the city; children awaiting their fathers pressed against windows and dreamed up to the dark that was just now emerging. Through it all, evidence of celebration streamed between shutters, angling from all sides into the narrow corners of the streets outside.

I went for a walk, retreading old, familiar sidewalks, far from--and still--alone. Lights weighed down pine boughs I passed, their illumination increasing as the night unfurled itself across the last scatters of sun. When confronted with wonder, we chose streetlights instead of stars; we have reached an age where night can be banished at will. Does it, then, lose its meaning--or merely become a choice?

I found my steps carrying me farther and farther from home and turned myself around, watching my neighborhood, for a moment, as a stranger would. There were swift, indistinct movements in the streets as faceless commuters arrived and re-entered their homes, unwrapping scarves and unbuttoning coats and shaking sheaths of grime from their shoes. Smoke streamed in billows from chimneys, grey-shifting, human mist, partially obscuring the sky.

Eventually, I walked back around to my street and my front yard, peering into my own home’s windows, at once enraptured and escaping, watching conversation without partaking, connected only thinly to those I loved inside. I could hear growing chatter, small puffs of laughter and music muffled by glass panes. I recognised my mother’s crisp keystrokes on the piano, accompanied by my father’s creaky croon.

_“What’ll I do_

_When you are far away_

_And I am blue_

_What’ll I do----”_

As I watched, my father’s voice trailed off tenderly as he bent toward my mother’s grey-peppered curls, resting his chin just above her forehead; an aunt or cousin took up the tune:

_“When I'm alone_

_With only dreams of you_

_That won't come true_

_What’ll I do?”_

Perhaps it would snow later on in the evening, and perhaps it would coat the roofs and chimneys white. Perhaps work and school would be cancelled and the next day would be free for art-making, letter-writing, undiluted amusement that turned children’s faces red and brought bright life to winter--perhaps. For now, I was content to let every question fade into the pale piano notes, the melodies that stirred up the air and left quiet joy in their wake. I saw my father place a kiss somewhere in my mother’s hair; someone in one of the corners of the room stood and began to dance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listened to some 1920s jazz and? i get why f thot wrote like that. like i get it now
> 
> Updates will be increasingly slow because writing this takes 5,000 prayers to god and the devil but i hope you all will stick around for the ride!


	3. Chapter 3

Time turned onward, and it was another week before I received another mysterious contact. This time, it was a letter delivered to my mailbox, so nondescript I didn’t look at it closely and almost missed the fact that it was for me. I carried the mail inside and spread it across the dining-room table in a crooked fan, only then noticing that I was the littlest envelope’s addressee. NICHOLAS CARRAWAY, it read, the full name hovering reluctant and ectoplasmic above my home address. After calling vaguely toward my father’s study that the post had arrived, I took the letter and settled myself by the fireplace to open it, lifting out the folded paper and beginning to read.

“Nicholas Carraway---”

It was handwritten, but handwritten in scrawly, looping cursive that had a somewhat childish slant, as if its author were out of practice or sick.

“It’s been some time. This is not the place for intricate phrasing, nor should it be, but I must somehow express this odd truth---I’m alive, Nicholas, and I don’t know how else to say it. I’m alive and I’m in dire need of a friend. It’s been over two years since I last saw you, and I have wanted to--”

Over two years. Alive. My eyes burned senselessly through the rest of the words, seeking the name I knew would rest on the bottom, the name with the stain of guilt and splendor that had infected my nights with its resurgence--

“Your absent friend,

J.”

I looked down at my hands to see that my knuckles had gone whiter than the paper, that I was literally ripping the letter apart by accidental force. With effort, I released it; at the separation, my fingers curled into maddened claws. Whoever had sent me the letter was a clever faker, that was certain; knowing they could not have mimicked Gatsby’s flamboyant signature, they hadn’t even tried. It was a profoundly cruel trick, and purposeless save to distort and unnerve me, but it was incredibly well-phrased. If not for the fact that I had been Nicholas--something nobody called me, let alone Gatsby--I might have heard it in his voice.

Despite my surety that the thing was entirely falsified, my curiosity overpowered my reason, and I could not help but read the rest of the letter, if only to assess how accurate the imitation was. 

“Nicholas Carraway---

It’s been some time. This is not the place for intricate phrasing, nor should it be, but I must somehow express this odd truth---I’m alive, Nicholas, and I don’t know how else to say it. I’m alive and I’m in dire need of a friend. It’s been over two years since I last saw you, and I have wanted to reach you. However, I found myself unwilling (unwilling to inconvenience you with the sudden re-introduction of my presence, that is) and then unable (it seems I, in my turmoil, had forgotten your name) to achieve contact.

I’m living far from where I was previously, rather close to the place I once childishly considered home. In the interest of my security, I have not disclosed my true location on this envelope, but rest assured that a reply to this address will reach me---should you wish to reply. I admit I hope you do.

I apologise once more for the suddenness and the oddness of my request.

Your absent friend,

J.”

I rose and marked down the address for an angry retort, tossing the rest of the words into the fire. Crossing to the table, I wrote out my reply, picking my words with great care.

“To whom it may concern:

I was unamused by your attempt to deceive me. The joke which you crafted and played upon me was not only in poor taste but decidedly cruel, as I was the close friend of the murder victim you here mock. I know Mr. Jay Gatsby to be dead, having seen his body with my own eyes.

Before sending such a letter as this again, please consider whether or not there are less morally destitute uses of your time. Generally, people do not appreciate being haunted by false replications of what they seek to avoid.

Sincerely,

‘Nicholas’ Carraway.”

As I wrote, an indistinct murmur of doubt drifted across my mind. Was there a chance that it really was Gatsby on the other end of that letter--Gatsby, alone again, and still reaching? Again, I heard his voice, low and smothered, rising off cold breath in the same brittle undertone I had heard the day he died-- _ Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alon _ e _. _

But there was no more Gatsby, no more outpourings of ecstatic smiles and incorruptible aspirations; my friend, taking with him his intrinsic hope and impossible radiance, had vanished from life forever, leaving only his greying, false obituary slapped beneath a blurry photo.

I returned my thoughts to the burnt letter. It repulsed me, leering from its guise of reality, horrible in its exigence. I wasn’t so cynical as to categorise the world into ‘deceived’ and ‘deceivers,’ but those types existed, and I refused to be the former. Swindles were common and meddlesome, and this was as clever as they came, but next from this ‘absent friend’ would be a request for a small sum of money, and then a request for still more. A hopeful person might have believed it.

Promissory wind blew between the corners of homes and sent itself in childish scampers across the frosty streets; the air was cold and clear and bracing, sharpening my wits as I left the house to mail my reply. Self-absorbed passersby milled past me, but they were few; it was cold and clouded with little promise of a roseate renewal of the sun. I was vigilant for some sort of physical change in the city that would have been commensurate to the unrest within me, but I observed nothing amiss; my neighborhood rolled towards the oncoming year, secure in its consistent, sedentary business.

Once I had deposited my reply in the mailbox, my spirits lifted, but I remained disquieted; the workings of the world had been slightly jarred, like some small cog had fallen out of a great machine. Gatsby resurfaced in my thoughts, pale in death and puissant; I could see a gun and moving water, a slowly spreading rim of red around what floated in the pool. Death has always been inexorable, and is, by definition, an end, yet I had still raged against it; still, no denial can obscure a fact. While he was in my thoughts, I resolved that I would refuse to allow the memory of my friend to be altered or disgraced in any way by the fraudulent letter. Gatsby and New York belonged in the ashes, and I wanted no more spectres of the deadweight past. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "J," of course, phonetically, is Jay.
> 
> Sorry for the FUCKIN DELAY on posting this i still have to sell my soul to the devil to write it and sometimes the devil's soul-retrieval system gets bogged down b/c a buncha other people are selling their souls to pay off their student loans and that's just how it is on this bitch of an earth
> 
> hm, i wonder who really wrote that letter? how odd an occurrence...


	4. Chapter 4

I had only just begun again the difficult but necessary endeavor of forcing sloughs of memories away--placing them carefully in the sunless places in my mind, where I hoped they would wilt--when there was another phone call. I was not present when it came in, but returned from another futile afternoon search for a temporary profession to find my mother prepared with a question.

“Nick,” she greeted me, opening the door on her placid voice, “Did you ever know someone named James?”

She was entirely unaware of what the name might have meant to me, what associations it held, and I attempted to school my features into some sort of primitive mask. 

“I did,” I replied, letting myself into the house and gaining impassivity. After a brief, shaken deliberation, I informed her that ‘James’ had been a passing acquaintance, a friend of Daisy’s whom I had met at some vague party that had taken place in an indeterminate location high on the golden arc of my summer.

“Was he high class?”

“In a way, yes,” I answered reluctantly. I had the sense that question was the circumventing of another. 

“Did he have an odd manner of speaking?” she asked after a moment. “Fancy?”

I stared across at her, unwound my fingers from each other. “He did.”

“I believe he wants to see you--” she fumbled for something, realised she already clutched it, and held out a small piece of paper, marked over in neat blue pen. “His address and telephone number.”

I leaned against the wall, my mouth cold. Whoever was pursuing me was not an easy quitter. My hand, willing itself not to tremble, took the paper from her. The address was indeed the same one that had graced the recent letter. It became necessary, I realised, to determine how much my mother knew about this ‘James.’ 

“Why did he call?” I asked.

“He said he’s fallen ill.” Having nowhere else to look, I watched my mother’s mouth slacken slightly as she tried to remember the precise wording. “His friends have deserted him. He said he wrote you, and received your response, but it left something to be desired.” There was amusement in her voice. “Why, what did you tell him?”

I composed the sort of generic, non-defensive response her question required and delivered it entirely without thought. My breathing was shallowing, now, raking my throat in furtive gusts. I indicated the general direction of the telephone. “Do you think I would be remiss if I--”

“Excellent idea, to return the call of your old friend. Especially if your letter was somewhat rude.”

Knowing differently, I asserted that I had been candid, not impolite.

“Go talk to him, though; he did seem to be in distress.”

Only then, as I left her to place the call, did I connect the number I held in my hand to the brief, near-soundless ‘conversation’ I had at Christmastime. My thoughts grew abruptly disordered, quickening their pace and my heartbeat to a fervor. I dialed in the sequence of numbers, searching for solace in the rhythmic click of the apparatus, but found none.

For a transitory moment, bare as a breath, I hoped there would be no response to my call. But an answering click greeted me, and I was no longer willing to waste any time. “Who are you?” I blurted into the unreal expanse between me and the unknown man’s receiver. “Who?”

The words did not come quickly. Silence drifted, then--

“I told you that well enough already, old sport.”

And, curtly and irrevocably, there was no longer any doubt. The voice was lower, humbler, altered, but it was unmistakable. It was him.

“Jay,” I whispered, or hissed, or moaned. I could heave nothing else to my lips. 

“It’s good to hear from you again.”

“You died,” I protested weakly. “I saw.”

“Jay Gatsby has passed on, I concede it,” the voice informed me, mournful for a moment. “That shell has peeled away, it seems. But James Gatz remains, entrenched in this sad earth still.”

“I saw your body.”

“You saw the body, not the death.”

“You were shot.”

“Nicholas,” and his voice held my name almost reverently, “Do you honestly think I could be who I was, consorting with who I was, and not have an ironclad escape route? I knew, and I always did, that my life was--”

“Not sustainable?”

“Criminal.”

“Dangerous.”

“I suppose, yes.”

“But how? How did you do it?”

“Madame Tussaud's waxworks. Popular attraction.”

I had been, once. “And--”

“I did what I had to. There was a death that day.”

“You shot Wilson.”

“I did.”

“Did Wolfsheim teach you the trick with the blood?”

Another silence. “He taught me many things.”

“Does he--”

“He and his men will be quiet, Nicholas.”

“Nick,” I correcred, rather maladroit even to my own ears. “I don’t go by Nicholas.”

“Nick,” Gatsby’s voice repeated. “You do believe me now?”

“I have no other choice.”

“I truly am sorry to come upon you like this, sudden and--”

“How,” I cut in. “How did you learn my name again?”

“A good deal of searching.”

I could imagine any number of ways he could have procured it--contacting my previous employer, searching the Fay family genealogy, uncovering a guest list for one of his many midnight revels and discovering me halfway down. “You’d been looking?”

“Yes, I had been. I am unwell, old--Nick. Nick,” he said again, testing or tasting my name. It dawned on me that I had never heard him say it.

“Old Nick,” I half-joked. “I guess I am. More so, now.”

“It’s been almost precisely three and a half years since I last saw you.”

“Yes, it has.”

“I really am sorry for my unexpected return--”

“Jay.” My eyes were pricking, and I prematurely wiped one as the other leaked. “James. There is nothing that is more miraculous than this. I’m--” My throat was catching and almost painful, and all I could manage was, “I’m so glad.”

“I missed you,” he said suddenly, a sporadic confesser. “I need--help.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve fallen sick,” he said, his anguish apparent. “Very.”

That explained the difference in his voice; there was physical, not merely emotional, congestion. “Where are you?” I looked down at the address still in my hand. “Never mind.”

“I’m not asking you to visit,” he said wanly. “I can’t ask that of you.”

“I’m going,” I apprised him, secure. 

“Nick--”

“I failed to help you once. I owe it to you, to be with you now.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“You invited me to one of your parties, didn’t you? Do you rescind that invitation now?”

“Of course not. It would be rude, wouldn’t it?”

“And you do want to see me?”

“You were my friend, old sport.” Then, in a failed attempt at casualness, “I’ve had very few.”

I understood that, more than I would have then admitted. “I’ll be on my way shortly. A few days for the train.”

“Thank you.” There was a subtle, aching relief in his voice, the sense of a soul unburdening itself at last. Something in his life had again found order. “And thank your charming mother for me, as well.”

“Always a gentleman,” I observed. I realised I smiling like a drunkard, equally near to laughing as sobbing from the sheer absurdity of it all. “Good night, old friend.”

“Good night, old sport.”

“I missed you, too,” I said suddenly, anxiously, but the click came so soon after I couldn’t be sure if he heard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens, huh?
> 
> Thank you all for staying with me!


	5. Chapter 5

Preparations were made for a next-day, early-morning departure, and I informed my parents that this ‘James Gatz’ had offered me reliable work. My specifications were vague enough to be nearly honest, precise enough to be entirely believable, and, far sooner than I expected, I was on the platform awaiting my Minnesota-bound train and thoroughly thanking my parents for their hospitality. They were relieved, I was certain, that I would no longer be their responsibility; parental love can stretch endlessly, but parental patience wears thin. I endured their final affectionate ministrations over the course of several impatient smiles, bidding them several repetitive goodbyes. I was eager to depart and they finally sensed it, together releasing me with a final declaration of love.

I boarded, stowed my luggage, selected a seat beside a dozing gentleman with a hat of black silk, and sat. Moments later, I waved as the train grumbled and steamed its mechanised girth into motion, and then it was unmoored and moving rapidly away. I stilled my hand and placed it against the window’s rattling glass, watching my family and the station collapse into a city blur that rose and fell like a mountain range. The trip before me would be long and grey, and I contemplated it without pleasure. Even so, I knew what awaited me on the end would be well worth any sufferance. Hopeful thoughts sustained me into a gradual sleep, but when I woke to the golden clatter of the lunch cart, my anxieties raised their heads and stirred.

Had I been hasty in my judgement? Had Gatsby called me to him entirely of his own volition, or was as I being lured? Was it, in fact, Gatsby? With hours of travel time left, there was nothing to do but churn my doubts and uneasiness thicker. Dark questions surfaced and sank, then rose ghostly again, rolling over like tormented, glassy-eyed fish. The train car was growing uncomfortably loud, or perhaps I was becoming inordinately sensitive; even the benign rustles of people’s newspapers became affronts to my ears. I refused food, feeling ill. The gentleman beside me, apparently concerned, offered me a peppermint, and I took it gratefully, but it tasted of nothing and crumbled like paper in my mouth. I turned back to the window, irked by the sound the train made as it scraped its wheels along the tracks, aggravated by how it chopped apart the passive rural air. I could see no buildings, no cities, no evidence of humanity but the train walls around me; I was on an island swallowed by an ocean of claustrophobic green. 

I must, somehow, have slept again, despite the brightness of the day. It was a restless sleep, the kind where dreams mesh indistinguishably with reality, corrupting the whole mind into a murky, kaleidoscopic senselessness. I slipped in and out of dream-murk for most of the remainder of the trip, but when I veritably woke, rationality shed irrationality like a duck shed water. My shoulder was sore, my neck stiff and sharply painful, but my mind was clear. On the telephone, I had recognised Gatsby’s voice, his mannerisms, and I knew irrevocably that he was sincere. My judgements, though they come slowly, prove accurate; I knew who Gatsby was, and I knew he willingly awaited me at the destination I approached.

By the time the train stopped, it was evening. Gatsby himself was not waiting for me at the platform, and I swallowed a bitter pang of disappointment with the knowledge that he was sick. A stranger, clutching a sheet of paper reading NICK CARRAWAY, greeted me instead as I carefully disembarked. She wordlessly offered to take one of my suitcases, but I refused, not wanting to burden her. She took it from me anyway with a slight smile, still saying nothing, and led me skillfully through the boisterous crowds of the station to the parking lot and then to a nondescript white car. Several times I attempted to initiate a dialogue, thanking her for carrying my suitcase, then complimenting her driving skills, then remarking on the weather, but each time she rebuffed my conversationalist advances courteously and briefly, offering me no insight into anything about her. “How do you know Gatsby?” returned “He hired me,” “What’s your name?” returned “Miss Skeene,” “Do you live around here?” returned “Yes.” Eventually, I gave up, which seemed to gratify her. In spite of her laconic nature, the drive we shared was not uncomfortable, and as the minutes passed, I thought of her less and less and of Gatsby more and more, anticipation building within me like water pressuring a dam.

We delved deeper into rural Minnesota on a curving, clearly unfrequented road. Corn, wheat, and grass streaked by monotonously, progressively darkening as the sun slipped away. It must have been a full hour until the car began to slow, cresting a soft dark hill to reveal a single house surrounded by a valley. It was of clapboard, small, and white, and a silhouette within it--Gatsby--was travelling from room to room downstairs, lighting up each window in anticipation of my arrival. A warm, homelike glow radiated from the house, diffusing the loneliness of its location and brightening the ink-black night outside.

The car overtook the last few yards with painful slowness. Then I saw him, really saw him, framed by light and standing confidently in the door. As soon as the car stopped, he raised an arm and waved regally, half-saluting. In spite of the affectation, he looked smaller, older, wearier, and I realised that this was Gatsby in his unpolished, unguarded state. His smile tore into me like a blade, a visceral thing; for a moment, there wasn’t a single thought in my mind that didn’t have his name on it.

I left the car, forgetting even to shut the door, took the front steps two at a time, and embraced him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> R E U N I O N , B I T C H E S
> 
> i fuckin love nick and gatsby. can't wait to see them be gay together.
> 
> there's no sike. i promise you they'll be gay together. their ship is literally tagged at the top of this thing
> 
> i can't believe my egregious breach of good faith. i've thus far FORGOTTEN to mention my brilliant beta reader, user daisyridley. i vastly adore her and i hope you guys vastly adore this fic. comments save my life. <3


	6. Chapter 6

For hours, we sat at his kitchen table, talking. Miss Skeene had taken the car--it was Gatsby’s, but he regularly lent it to her--and had driven herself home for the night, leaving Gatsby and me alone in the unfamiliar house. We spoke of the passage of time, of families and old friends, of nothing and everything and how, exactly, Jay Gatsby had ended up living alone and modestly in the middle of nowhere. I could sense he still felt the bitter tang of loss when the subject of our time in New York was brushed upon, so I steered our conversation away from it with as much subtlety as I could by asking him questions about what he did, what he enjoyed, what his new life had brought him that his old life could not. To my surprise, he was recalcitrant to speak at length about himself, the first true change I noticed in him. He lavished attention on me instead, expounding about how he’d impatiently awaited my arrival. He did look poorly and was clearly sick; I asked him if that was why Miss Skeene had been hired, to take care of him. It was clear their relationship was nothing more than that of employer and employee.

“Yes,” he said haltingly. “She helps trim and straighten my hair when I go into town or entertain guests. I consider her a friend.”

I wondered how often he’d had to hire his ‘friends.’ “How long do you want me to stay?” I asked to fill the small silence. I indicated my two suitcases stacked by the door. “I believed it prudent to bring excess clothes rather than run the risk of ending up short on them.”

“Sensible of you.” He eyed me critically. “Was the trip uncomfortable?”

I informed him it had been too late to purchase a first-class train ticket, and pity crossed his eyes. “You must have been in a hurry to see me.”

“I was. I thought you were dead.”

His eyes flicked askance for a moment. “I’m sorry about that.”

The mundaneness--’I’m sorry about that’-- shook me into laughter, and I found myself utterly at a loss. “I missed you,” I said finally. “Mourned you.”

“I’m glad you came.”

I almost asked him what he wanted me to do. Keep him company? Or something else? I still wouldn’t want to work for him, but I knew I’d be happy to stay as long as he needed me and briefly entertained the notion of bringing him back home to Wisconsin somehow. “Do you often have guests?”

He gave me a particularly empty smile. “Occasionally.”

“Who?”

“I periodically host…” He trailed off, looked aside again. “A sort of community gathering. Nobody lives all that nearby, so they needed someone to bring them together, and I took it upon myself. I have books and the like for the farmers’ children, and Miss Skeene is an excellent multi-instrumentalist. She sings, too.”

I marveled at the fact that, even here, he still had found a way to entertain. “I’m happy for you.” Another thought occurred. “How will we explain my presence?” I bore no resemblance to either Gatsby or Miss Skeene and could not have been family to either.

He blinked. “Why must we?”

“Rumors, Jay,” I told him. “Two men living in a house alone, and not for business.”

“Money can buy off rumors,” he said easily, then stopped. 

“Not forever.”

“Could you--”

“I can’t buy another house,” he returned sharply, though that would not have been my request. “I don’t have the money anymore. I willed it all--away.”

Because he couldn’t meet my eyes, I knew where it had gone. “You willed it to Daisy.”

“Of course I willed it to Daisy--you don’t understand, Nick--” He wrung his hands. “I loved her.” He stopped, turned his voice toward the ceiling. “I could have been anything, but I loved her instead.”

So he lived his life imparting ever-growing deathless dreams, carving formless, gorgeous ephemerality out of his pockets and his person, and still believed himself low. I saw that clearly, but his self-pity stood out clearer still. I stood. “Just because you loved her doesn’t mean she owed you anything,” I told him coldly. “She didn’t deserve it anyway.”

He presented me with a tragic stare, and I wondered how long it would take him to release the dream he had fed on so long. 

“You have to start living for yourself, Gatsby,” I sighed, and clapped him on the shoulder. Even as I said it, though, I privately wondered if he even could—or if that ability, like much of his common sense, had been stripped away away by the loss of the woman he loved. 

“You’re right, old sport,” he said vacantly, clearly unconvinced. “I am alone, after all.” 

“You’re not,” I reminded him, and gestured to myself,  “I’m here.”

“You ought to call me James, I suppose,” he went on after an unhearing silence, still staring across the table toward where I had been seated. “I’m James Gatz, really. Not Jay Gatsby anymore.”

There was a saddening significance in his words, and I understood why, just as I understood his reluctance to relinquish all the trimmings and traits he had so proudly and painstakingly pulled into his personality. I saw that he was feeling barren, in this small white house swallowed by the vast, abundant greenness of rural Minnesota, that again he was losing some previously concrete idea of himself to vast seas of circumstance. “I’ll call you whatever you want me to,” I proposed. “If you say you’re Jay Gatsby, you are.”

He seemed to come back to clarity at the speaking of his name, standing and releasing his ineffably beautiful smile. “Thank you,” he said, and looked at me closely. “You're wan,” he observed. “I set a guest room for you upstairs. It isn’t--it’s not to the standard you’re used to, I’m certain, but I hope it--”

“It will be fine,” I assured him, since of all the rooms in a house, bedrooms have the least necessity of being decadent; their occupants are usually either unconscious or in a particular state of indisposition that does not entirely permit them to care what the room they’re in looks like. He and I took a suitcase each, and only then did I realise the incredible fatigue my body stored from the travel and the lateness of the hour--earliness of the hour, rather, for night was already threading its way toward cautious dawn.

“I’m sorry about the money,” Gatsby said suddenly, as we mounted the stairs. “I didn’t--I have some of it, of course, but I had to leave a good deal in the will to allay suspicion.”

There wouldn’t have been any suspicion; even if he had expended his entire fortune carelessly, as most monied people do, and had released a will of nothing more than three dollars, nobody would have blinked an eye at the paltry sum. But Gatsby was nothing if not ruthlessly careful, believing himself an incurable strategist, and while I had borne and admired him by turns, I had always respected him. So I offered no objections, instead extending pleasantries until I bade him a sincere good night.

Though the room was colorless and cramped, the bed allotted to me little more than a spindly wooden cot, I slept soundly, kept company by the knowledge that my friend was close and breathing, that the three deaths the Buchanans had left in their wake had gone down, discreetly, to two. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going on a trip where I won't have my laptop, so the next update might be a little while. While I'm away, I'll be writing this in my notebook (like a goddamned peasant). I'll get chapter seven to you all as soon as I can, but please be patient. Thank you all for reading this, and if you're so inclined, you can check out some of the other stuff I wrote (though this is my only TGG fic).


	7. Chapter 7

Morning met me late the next day; I was awakened past 10 PM by a few repetitions of a dark, muffled cough and a persistent birdsong. The noises around me were thin and unfamiliar, and I lay still for a lengthy moment, attempting to untangle my mind from the last few morsels of dream. All at once, clarity struck me, and all semblance of tiredness left—I knew where I was. Excitement generating within me, I practically sprang from my bed, flying down the cheerfully creaking stairs like a child on Christmas morning. The sight that met my eyes was far from joyous.

Gatsby sat in the seat I’d seen him in last, slumped like a doll. Miss Skeene had a hand on his shoulder and was speaking in a low, urgent voice. The room seemed to careen around them, swaying on a toxic axis—something was very wrong. The coughing I’d heard resumed, Gatsby trembling with the force of it. Miss Skeene turned to me sharply. “Water,” she urged, and I raced to the sink, throwing open cabinets until I had procured a glass. When I handed it to my friend, I saw his hands were trembling.

“Is he feverish?” I asked.

Miss Skeene nodded. She pressed her hand more firmly into his back and moved it in expanding circles as he drank. Abruptly, he coughed again mid-swallow, water spraying across the table. He brought his arm up to his mouth and took it away, slowly. Though he tried to hide it, I saw his shirtsleeve come away smeared with battered red.

“He needs a doctor,” I said, reflexively backing away. “Miss Skeene, he needs a doctor.”

“White death,” she said softly. “Or pneumonia.”

“That’s blood,” I said, more forcefully. “That’s _blood_. We have to get him--”

“Where?” Gatsby asked. “Nick, where?”

“A sanitorium, a clinic! They have them for cases like these--”

“And there’s not one nearby that would treat me. In case you haven’t noticed,” he smiled wryly, blood edging his lower lip, “Neither me nor Miss Skeene is--”

“Gatsby, there has to be something,” I protested. “There _will be_ something. But if you stay here, you’ll--”

“You should go.” His voice scraped, rattling in his throat, and I could practically feel the pain.

“What?”

“Leave, Nick,” he managed, attempting feebly to stand. “I should never have called you out here--” And he was coughing again.

“I can pay any fees. I can--I’ll take you back with me, and they’ll have a doctor--”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Carraway,” Miss Skeene cut in clippedly, “Leave the room.”

“He’s my friend.” I surreptitiously retook over the distance I’d stepped from him, coming almost close enough to touch him. Miss Skeene noticed and threw out a hand to keep me away.

“There is no reason for you also to be sick,” she snapped.

“She’s right.”

Miss Skeene turned on him. “Mr. Gatz, save your lungs. Don’t speak.”

“If it is white death--” I started.

“He already lives in isolation and will infect no-one.”

“You,” I argued, “Me.”

“My parents caught the disease when I was young and I did not. I am unconcerned with me. But for you I worry. You do not have the same…”

“Immunity,” I supplied.

“Immunity,” she finished. “So leave the room. The property, if you wish. I will help Mr. Gatz through this cough, and then we two will discuss your return to your home. It is dangerous for you to stay. He has worsened much.”

“He’s my friend.”

“And, as your friend, he doesn’t want you ill. Go.”

Seeing it wasn’t fit to argue, I stepped away. “Gatsby, I’m sorry.”

“Miss Skeene is right,” he croaked. I winced at the sound. “I wish I had never asked you to be here.”

“I understand it,” I said. “You were alone.”

“I wasn’t this poorly yesterday, or the day I called you.”

“I know,” I replied, “I know.” I wondered if, in my excitement, I had overlooked just how unwell he was when I’d spoken to him. “Don’t try to speak. Just feel better. I’ll be back soon.”

At that, I turned to go. Irrationally, I felt Miss Skeene’s eyes on my back all the way until I had reached the front door. Shaking off the sensation, I left the house still in pyjamas to study the area for the first time.

The valley was not as great as I’d supposed; the hills, pooled in night shadows at the hour of my arrival, had softened with daylight and seemingly shrank. The view did not suffer from excessive charm, and a sense of isolation, even cynicism, subdued me momentarily. It was the blue and gigantic expanse of sky that struck me most; it seemed, in a way it never had before, desolate. If Gatsby or Miss Skeene were to perish alone in the midst of this emptiness, I realised, nobody save me would know.

I don’t know how long I paced around the house, how long I spent staring at nothing and searching for some sign that I was not adrift. Finally, Miss Skeene opened the door and met me, somber, at the base of the front stairs.

I wasted no time in confronting her. “What if he dies of this?”

“He will not,” she declared, but I saw a whisper of doubt behind her eyes.

“He may.”

“You feel tenderly for him,” she observed, not without compassion.

“I do,” I affirmed. “He left a mark on me that will not soon be erased.”

“Everything is erased as the world turns over.”

“Not him.”

“If he dies of his illness, be it the white death or not, he should not take another with him.”

“If I fall ill as well, I can return home and seek treatment.”

“And by the time you arrive there, it might be too late.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” I said, realising its truth as I spoke it. “I want to stay.”

“Why?” she asked. “Mr. Carraway, you struck me as a reasonable man.”

‘Why’ is the most human of questions, the most heartfelt, the most intricate, the most difficult to answer. Why did I feel so bound to Jay Gatsby? Did some part of me believe that, if I stayed, I could help him? Did some part of me believe I could save him?

“Because must show our friendship for a man while he is alive and not after he is dead,” I said simply. “I learned that lesson from this very man.”

Miss Skeene blinked slow and, finally, nodded in acquiescence. “Then unpack, Mr. Carraway,” she ordered coolly, and led me back into the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> White death was what they called TB in the twenties.
> 
> Glad this fic is back? Let me know! <3 I'm glad you're still around!


	8. Chapter 8

To reunite with my friend again, only to lose him, was a possibility I refused to contemplate. After unpacking my clothes and toiletries and setting them throughout the room, I decided it would be beneficial to write my parents and inform them I would be staying indefinitely--perhaps for months. I explained my absence by giving myself a steady job as a reporter and a lovely small property I had rented a room in, a house with blue shutters, a yellow door, and roses in the front lawn despite the coldness of the weather. Creating this false merriment distressed me, and I found myself distracted again. I stopped the letter early, signed off on it with an unusually imprecise signature, and folded it up, only to realise I had forgotten an envelope. The garden I had created instantly seemed grotesque; perhaps I missed home, though I doubted it. I dropped the letter on the rickety desk and headed downstairs, following the sound of wretched coughing.

“Mr. Carraway.” Miss Skeene greeted me as soon as I reached the bottom step. She had unbound her hair from its single braid, and I noticed its length for the first time. Oddly reflective, it poured down her body all the way to her waist, glinting as it shifted slowly. It held not a metallic sheen, as one might find on a polished button, but instead seemed luminous of its own volition, and I wondered where it had found the bravery to glow. I had believed Miss Skeene to be a very harsh, plain woman, but I saw in that moment, with the sunlight from the windows haloing her head, that what I had mistaken for harshness was actually strength. It could not have been easy to live in isolation, and I could only imagine all the work and care a man like Gatsby would need.

“How can I help him?” I asked.

“Mr. Gatz wishes for your companionship. I…” she hesitated, her hand twitched, and, backed by that simple gesture, her nervousness surfaced. Clearly, this hook-nosed, black-eyed servant who spoke little, felt much. She cared for Gatsby, I realised. Perhaps she saw in him some of what I had. “I believe your presence here helps him,” she said carefully. “Yesterday, when he saw you, he was happy. When he spoke to you--”

The warmth I had felt evaporated. “I didn’t realise you heard us.”

Her dark eyes flashed. “He is sick and I care for him. I must be nearby.”

She was right; any sudden movement of mine might have, at any time, set Gatsby back into throes of coughing. Her eavesdropping was justifiable, then, and I adjusted my stance to appear less defensive. She noted the change; her eyes flicked over me from head to toe, and I must have passed inspection. “Come, see him.”

“Why is he not in bed?” I asked, as we moved from the living room into the adjacent, smaller room, which might once have been a study but now held Gatsby, a couch, and a fireplace in which a single flame struggled to dance. Miss Skeene saw how small the fire had become and hissed through her teeth, not answering my question. Gatsby, on the couch, called my name.

“I’m here,” I answered immediately, crossing to him and kneeling at his side. There appeared to be a small rim of blood caked around the inside of his lips, on which were writ the faintest bloom of a smile. He reached for my hand and took it; his skin was shockingly dry, but his grip was steady.

“Thank you,” he said. “I do believe I’m getting better.”

I shook my head. “Don’t speak.”

“It doesn’t hurt to. I  _ am _ better,” he insisted. “I’m sorry for attempting to send you away yesterday.”

“I’m glad you don’t want me to leave,” I said, buoying my words with cheer I did not feel. “It’s a long train ride between home and here.”

“I hope I was worth the trip.”

“It’s not every day a friend returns from the dead. Which reminds, me, how does it feel to be Lazarus?”

“Well,” he replied with fastidious facetiousness, “It feels quite a bit like having pneumonia.”

I laughed. Miss Skeene, who had left unnoticed, re-entered with a newspaper in one hand and a thin log in the other. She put the fresh log rather carelessly into the fireplace, which cracked the charred log already there and extinguished its last pathetic flame for good. Unruffled, she crumpled the newspaper and, as I watched, lit it from one of the more furious embers. Immediately, the room brightened as the paper crackled, took up a flame, and was ecstatically consumed. The high-spirited, crisping new fire licked along the sides of the log before enveloping it in a lover’s embrace, and Miss Skeene, satisfied, left Gatsby and me alone again--though I suspected she lurked just outside the door. I looked searchingly into my friend’s face and saw that his eyes had grown glassy, two brown and worried marbles in a brown and weary face. 

“Is there anything I can get you?” I asked, wanting to keep his half-lidded eyes open, knowing that as long as he looked at me I would know he was alive.

“No,” he answered, and attained only that syllable before his chest exploded upward, his shoulders heaving as he began to cough again. He coughed wetly, vengefully, savagely, as if his lungs were trying to expel themselves in order to enact revenge against him. I flinched backward as if jerked by a string and wiped fluid from my face. Miss Skeene’s wiry hands found my ribs and fiercely hauled me to my feet, pulling me from Gatsby’s side. Reflexively, I reached out to him, and my fingers just brushed his before I was practically hurled from the room, the door slammed in my face. After a staggeringly disorienting moment where I wondered with the fog of a drunken man how exactly I had gotten from there to here, I sat down heavily, resting my back against the wall next to the door. I heard the sound of coughing grow quieter and quieter until I could hear the popping of the fire through it, and over that, a slow-cresting, aching croon of what I knew must be Miss Skeene’s voice. Her breath lifted the unfamiliar melody as it might have lifted a feather, delicately and inconsistently, richly and impossibly. Thick, sweet notes wafted across the sick-stained air all the way to the door and slid between the cracks in the wood, pooling and sliding across the floor only to rise again to meet my ears.

I could not understand her words, but her voice carried Gatsby love and medicine, suppressing my fear as the syrup she fed him suppresses a cough.


End file.
